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FIFA and SAP: Two peas in a technological pod

by Laura Casasanto

June 30, 2010

Much like a ref calling goals at the World Cup, determining which SAP enhancement packages you need can leave you confused and making bad calls.

Fortunately for the world of football, FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter said yesterday that FIFA would reopen the file discussing goal-line technology and its potential use in the future. He apologized for the errors in judgment by the FIFA refs in the England-Germany and Argentina-Mexico matches, saying:

I deplore the obvious refereeing mistakes we have seen. I understand the teams concerned are unhappy. I have personally said ‘I apologise for what happened’ to both England and Mexico. I understand the media criticism, it is their right and job to do so. Still, it’s not the end of the competition, it’s not the end of football. With the denial of the use of technology, we have to accept mistakes.

And fortunately for the SAP community, making decisions regarding enhancement package implementations is similarly benefiting from the use of technology.

“Customers don’t want to have to browse through more than 300 single business functions in order to find out exactly what they need,” Christian Oehler, a solution expert at SAP, said in a recent interview with Project Expert’s Davin Wilfrid. Davin talked to Oehler and his colleague Robert Pinzke, an upgrade business expert at SAP, about a free service that SAP offers to companies wishing to get a clear picture of exactly which enhancement package functionality their company needs to implement or activate.

The service, called Business Function Prediction, uses data from your company to create a custom report detailing which functionality would best benefit your company based on your individual system usage. Subscribers can read Davin’s article in full here to get a complete overview of the new Business Function Prediction service.

FIFA president Blatter hit the nail on the head when he said, “With the denial of the use of technology, we have to accept mistakes.” Luckily, the technology to ensure you don’t make mistakes when deciding which enhancement package functionality to update is here to save you from errors in judgment like this doozy.